Gary

@Andrzej the reference for many (older) Americans is the theme song from the TV show "The Beverly Hillbillies" Come and listen to my story 'Bout a man named Jed A poor mountaineer, Barely kept his family fed. And then one day He was shootin' at some food, And up through the ground came a-bubblin' crude. Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea. Well the first thing you know Ol' Jed's a millionaire, Kinfolk said "Jed move away from there". Said "California's the place you outta be". So they loaded up the truck And they moved to Beverly. Hills that is, Swimming pools, movie stars.

@Mike Bass'd on recent experience, alto often I mezzo up when I countertenor more.

@Geoff same for me, exactly. But I was pretty sure that Jason Mraz didn't have a mega-hit about eggs, which is how I ... uh ... cracked it. Gen X ellipsis for the EMU :)

@Forrest I love sports! Especially when they kick the home run basket!

@Andrzej A musical "slur" is a curved arc that spans several notes, in order to join them into a phrase, so the musician knows to connect them (as appropriate for the piece and instrument/voice making the music) Read (and see) more/better here: <a href="https://dictionary.onmusic.org/terms/3216-slur" target="_blank">https://dictionary.onmusic.org/terms/3216-slur</a> It's notation for another xword fave: LEGATO :)

@J.S. I confidently put in "necco" but eroded that one letter at a time as the crosses came in.

@John "words to a newborn"

@Andrzej Both JAG and "bender" refer to a period (typically, a night) of debauchery, usually alcoholic in nature. There are connotation differences, perhaps. "Bender" is always about alcohol (or drugs), while (for me, at least) a "jag" can be of a different sort, e.g., a "crying jag" is an extended outburst of crying, clearly distinct from a "drunken jag" which is an extended period of drinking. Etymologies are interesting, as far as I could find. One source says "bender" is American English from the mid-19th century. "Jag" is older, and apparently comes from a word for a full wagon load, and "jag" came to mean enough liquor to get drunk, and then to drinking bout itself, and then to the idea of a general outburst akin to a drinking bout.

@Barry Ancona they invented AM Stereo just in time for no one to listen to it :)

Another few hundred puzzles and indeed they will go faster, if that's your goal, but there other goals too. I focus on speed, maybe too much sometimes, but it's also nice to smell the flowers, so to speak ... this one had a lot to enjoy. One thing about a really fast solve is that you end up missing 30-40% of the clues.

@Patrick J. It seems that Sidney Paget, the illustrator for the original publication of some of the stories, used the deerstalker in his illustrations, so it's canon-adjacent if not strictly canonical (should that be Conanical?) Wikipedia has a photo of Paget in a deerstalker :)

@Matt RITAOREOSPEEDWAGON needs to get in a puzzle someday.

@Paul Even for middle-aged crossword puzzling Americans, FDR's dog is obscure, as is the Nevada county. LAREDO, OSU, even ORRIN Hatch ought to be solidly in the memory cells though. The obscurity of clues should challenge anyone regardless of country: secondary Facebook founder, Sumo wrestler, Icelandic poet, secondary Toy Story character, Haitian currency, Time man of the year from 3 decades ago, etc. Maybe some of these are only obscure for me?

@Andrzej According to one online etymology, the US use of the term to mean "to waver in decision" derives from a Scots verb "waff" which is analogous to "waver." There are quite a few back-engineered etymologies floating around having to do with waffle batter and flippable breakfast foods, but I'm not sold. An early "hack" of the google search algorithm was pulled off during the 2004 US presidential election, when the John Kerry campaign site was the first result when searching for "waffles". This was a response to Bush's White House biography being the first result for a search on "miserable failure" in 2003, perhaps the first google-bombing.

@Judith Fairview At age 14 or 15 while learning to type (one had to learn to type relatively late in those days!), I decided my exercise would be to type the theme song for the Brady Bunch as fast as I could. So it is firmly stuck in my muscle memory: This is the story of a lovely lady, who was brining up three very lovely girls. All of them had hair of gold, like their mother, the youngest one in curls. This is the story of a man named Brady, who was busy with three boys of his own. They were four men, living all together, but they were all alone. Till the one day that this lady met this fellow, and they knew it was much more than a hunch, that this group must somehow form a family, that's the way they all became the Brady Bunch!

@Steve The Paul Noth New Yorker cartoon comes to mind: "There can be no peace until they renounce their Rabbit God and accept our Duck God!" best link I could find that works right now <a href="https://norberthaupt.com/2015/11/22/the-rabbit-god-and-the-duck-god" target="_blank">https://norberthaupt.com/2015/11/22/the-rabbit-god-and-the-duck-god</a>/

@Matt while birdwatching in a neighborhood park trail, my wife and I met a woman who asked if we had seen the roc bird. We were a bit puzzled but figured it was a culture or maybe a large hawk. No, she assured us, it was a roc bird from the spirit realm. And that is how I learned about the roc bird!

@Harri also 3D, 56D, maybe 7D and 15D, 12D for sure, 35D perhaps?

@Joe like the old saying goes: - literature becomes sociology - sociology becomes psychology - psychology becomes biology - biology becomes chemistry - chemistry becomes physics - physics becomes mathematics - mathematics becomes impossible

@Clem I looked up the etymology. Some sources seem to say that "error" and "err" come to English from Latin via the old French "errer" The fun part is (at least one source) says that "errer" s actually two identically spelled and pronounced words, with fundamentally overlapping meanings, one of which comes from Latin "errare" (to wander, to stray), and the other comes from Latin iter (road) and iterare (travel). These senses converge in modern English "errant" (and the variant "arrant." I've long had a joke in my head about a pair of two distinct words with separate origins that are homographs (spelled the same), homophones (sound the same), and homonyms (mean the same) simultaneously. I am delighted to have found this example.

@Courtney congratulations! 33 months of madness!

@Joe P the number indicates how many rebus entries are adjacent to the square with the number. The minesweeper game was a logic puzzle where you figured out where the mines were, by deducing from the numbers where the mines had to be.

@Andrzej don't forget the lanai...

@Andrzej my wife is learning a little Polish, she would say declensions are deadly rather than vital :)

@Eric Hougland I think "hun" is an acceptable alternative spelling, even if you've fallen out with Attila. "uHNO" for [Gasp] is more of a stretch for me.

@Sonja almost certainly breathing! If all goes well I should hit that milestone in May ... in the meantime I go backwards in time in the archives.

@Michael don't forget "many a trial component" @42A which completes a nice trio

@Sam Lyons Those two do indeed have a definite turn-of-the-millennium aspect (1st HP film 2001, Finding Nemo 2003). I had young kids at the time, advantage me :) Apparently in this same timeframe, Natick opened its (then-) new arts center in the old fire house, and its high school speech team won 2nd place in the Massachusetts state tournament. Let's remember these facts for a puzzle someday! Those would be True Naticks(tm)

@Anthony if their parents have financial means ... though I have to say, my observation is that the parents are often Swifties too, and not teenage(d).

@Paul we used to joke about the "Never tear us apart" video, which featured Michael Hutchence and his romantic interest both with beautiful long dark curly hair, that it should be "they'll never tell us apart"

@Linda Jo I just put a medicine cabinet into my bathroom :)